Limerick Maternity Hospital

Two months ago it was announced that Limerick’s Maternity hospital will be relocating to the main campus of University Hospital Limerick under the government’s €27 billion capital plan[1]. However there is no mention of what will happen to the hospital building.

Limerick's obstetrics and midwifery services are centralised in the Mid-Western Regional Maternity Hospital located on the Ennis Road, north of the city centre. I can see the logic behind this move for those cases that require a newborn to be rushed from the Ennis Road to University Hospital Limerick in Dooradoyle. Battling the traffic each minute must seem like an hour to any parent. It is natural that a high proportion of people in Limerick choose to live in that area near the hospital rather than the city centre. Best practice internationally confirms that the preferred site for a maternity hospital is to be co-located with an acute hospital. Nevertheless I will be sad to see the end of the stand alone maternity hospital. This is where the future of the hospital remains uncertain and if it shall still remain, in some shape or form, a hospital or care unit or even if it will be demolished.It is a building type that emerged in the last century and will go in this one. 

My mother was born in a nursing home, her four children in the Limerick Maternity Hospital. Her first grandchild was born in that hospital in February of this year. If she has any more grandchildren it looks like they will be born in the mammoth University Hospital Limerick campus. It was a joy to be able just walk up into this medium-sized hospital to visit my new nephew without the screeching ambulances of A&E. There is something so intimate about a site dedicated purely to waddling women and babies. 

OS Map of Limerick (1872) showing Bellefield House

History of maternity care in Limerick

Up to the 1950s, home births were the norm in Ireland and Lying-in or Maternity Hospitals was considered to be for the use of the poor or if medical intervention was required. The Hospitals Commission Report 1933-6 noted that the practice of calling for the ‘handywoman’ if help was needed during home deliveries. The ‘handywoman’ was a sort of traditional, untrained midwife who would often through her ignorance of sources of infection, cause death by septicaemia. It would not be until 1918 through the Midwives (Ireland) Act that midwifery was regulated. The first Lying –in Hospital

Lying-in Hospital, Bedford Row

in Limerick was founded in 1812 as a voluntary hospital and then moved to junction of Bedford Row and Henry Street in 1866 and from then on was known as the Bedford Row Lying-in Hospital[2]. Service slowly expanded and a training centre for midwives as set up at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1935 the Hospital took over the domiciliary maternity services for the City with the appointment of a midwife to attend women in their homes during childbirth. From its foundation, the Hospital was critically dependent on subscriptions and fundraising which was organised by the Ladies Management Committee, populated by many of the wives of attending doctors at the Hospital. The religious orders were not involved in the running of Bedford Row as nuns were not permitted to nurse maternity cases at that time however St Munchin’s parish has and always had provided a chaplaincy service for the hospital. Alternatively births also took place in the city up until the early 1980s in Nursing Homes which were often in private houses such as St Anthony’s on Barrington’s Street or ‘Mrs Moloney’s’ in the Irish Estates, Corbally.

The new hospital was located on the other side of Sarsfield Bridge (left hand side of photo). Image
taken from Limerick Museum & Archives

The location of the new maternity hospital

The Lying-In Hospital could not cope with the number of births for the city and the use of private maternity homes became increasingly popular during the twentieth century[3]. The Hospital Commission first advised in 1933 that a fresh site should be bought for the building of a new maternity hospital and the site identified as Belfield, just north of the river Shannon was purchased for £2000 in 1935 with the purchase also of old Belfield House for an additional £3000 in 1936 to provide a larger site. In 1936 the Department of Local Government and Public Health put forward the proposal that a large maternity hospital consisting of eighty-six beds to be built in the city that would cater for the poor as well as those who could afford to pay. Thus in 1938 legislation was introduced in the Dail to build a maternity hospital and the site on the Ennis Road was secured[4].

Image taken from Limerick Museum & Archives

It was envisaged from the outset that a new hospital on the Belfield site would be managed by a committee made up of seven representatives from Limerick Corporation and seven representatives from the existing Bedford Row Committee. However the intervention of the Second World War resulted in inordinate delays and Bedford Row continued to function as per usual with patients in 1935 having to put up with the very considerable noise generated from the construction of the adjacent Savoy Cinema. Dr James Deeny, Chief Medical Officer visited Bedford Row on a countrywide hospital tour in 1945 and was left unimpressed by the state of the Bedford Row Hospital at that stage. A letter was sent to the City Manager from the Department of Health in July 1948, proposing that a Regional Maternity Hospital catering for Limerick City, Tipperary and Clare be built on the Belfield site and that this Hospital should be operated, not as was previously envisaged, jointly by representative of Limerick Corporation and the Bedford Row Committee, but exclusively by the Limerick Corporation. The Bedford Row Committee had considerable funds from the Sweepstakes contributions but ultimately agreed to transfer their interests in the Belfield site to the Corporation as they felt they would be unable to pay for the construction and maintain the running costs of the new maternity hospital without the support of Central Government.

Belfield House was at one stage suggested as a suitable building to house patients suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. In a letter dated 26 September 1944 the Tuberculosis Officer, T.W Moran to the City Manager described the building as

‘A two storied building standing on open ground. On the ground floor in front there are three rooms of twenty-four feet, eighteen feet, and twenty-seven feet long by eighteen feet, and twenty-seven feet long by eighteen feet, twelve feet, and eighteen feet long by twelve feet deep. At the back, there are two rooms each of separate W.C. is provided upstairs[5]’.

Four years later there was an obvious need for a new maternity hospital in Limerick as the Lying-In Hospital on Bedford Row could not cope. The City Medical Officer observed that between 1943 and 1948 there had been 1,400 births in the Limerick city and county borough. To serve this number was a meagre 26 beds of the Bedford Row Hospital complimented by several smaller nursing homes[6]. In a letter from the Limerick City Medical Officer it is evident that the Minister early on recognised that the site on the Ennis Road was the best possible option

‘It is very desirable that the Maternity Hospital should be located as close as possible to the main centre of population and for that reason a more central site than that of the Regional Hospital should be selected. There is a suitable site at Bellefield, Ennis Road, which is owned by the authorities of Bedford Row Maternity Hospital and the Minister is of opinion that the Regional Maternity Hospital should be built on that site if it can be secured[7]’.

The Medical Officer thus wrote to the Minster for Health asking for the authorisation of a grant from the Hospital Trust funds of 100 per cent of the approved cost of the new maternity hospital which was approved in May 1949. Belfield House was demolished to clear the site to make way for the much needed Hospital. The legacy of Belfield House remains as the name for a residential avenue next to the hospital called Bellefield Gardens. The architect for this hospital was Patrick Sheahan who began preparatory drawings in 1951 and its build overlapped with the construction of the Mid-west Regional Hospital. Always economically practical Sheahan ensured that any surplus steel from the Regional site was transported to the Maternity site. The building of St. Munchin’s Regional Maternity Hospital commenced in 1955 and received its first patients in October 1960[8]. Prior to this, large numbers of patients continued to have their babies delivered at home, with Bedford Row accounting for 572 deliveries in 1952 and a number of private Nursing Homes around the City accounting for an increasing number of births. As an interim solution, prior to commencing construction of the new Maternity Hospital, the Department of Health remedied the lack of State provision of maternity beds by opening a seventeen bed Maternity Unit in the City Home in 1954 and this did have a welcome impact on the activity at Bedford Row with the number of patients reducing from 771 in 1953 to 604 in 1955[9].

After the building of the Regional Maternity Hospital, Bedford Row was excluded from the receipt of any funding from the Hospital Commission and subsequently its Local Authority support was also reduced and eventually withdrawn in 1957. To meet expenses it began to charge its patients and ironically this facility for the maternity needs of the destitute was now a private hospital. By 1969 only one other nursing home apart from Bedford Row offered obstetric services. The Hospital continued to have financial difficulties as a result of rising healthcare costs and had no option but to close down in 1975.

The Regional Maternity Hospital subsequently grew into the largest Maternity Hospital outside of the three major Dublin maternity hospitals. The ground works for the hospital began in 1957 and the complex was completed in 1960 but did not receive any expectant mothers until the following year. This was due to two factors; (a) medical practices had changed so much during the period of construction that the hospital had to be re-equipped with more modern machinery and operating equipment[10] and (b) am accommodation block was designed for the nurses but this wing was reassigned for a different purpose. This marked the social change that nurses no longer resided on the hospital premises as they had done previously. When it opened it had 60 beds and 30 cots and this was subsequently increased to 80 beds in 1969. At the end of its first full year of operation in 1961, there were 1576 births. A number of phased developments have taken place at the Hospital in particular the opening of the first Home Birthing Unit in the country (see Appendix C for photographs of original plans and elevations). The Maternity Hospital had an interrupted view of the river Shannon and Sarsfield Bridge before the construction of brick faced apartments in the eighties and what was formerly the Intercontinental Hotel facing the hospital is now the rebuilt Strand Hotel.

Hospital elevations. Photo taken by Emma Gilleece. Plans courtesy of family of original architect.

 

Photo taken by Emma Gilleece

The design of Maternity hospital

This hospital has a moulded concrete stringcourse along the top of the central bay is divided in two by a chevron pattern which is typical of Art Deco eccentricities. The use of balconies along the length of the front façade gives the building its horizontal character and also by the bars on its vertical windows. This is a building of hard lines both vertically and horizontally broken only by the insertion of feminine detail at the ends of each balcony railing sections of a curvaceous inverted ‘S’ shape. Balconies were well established by this time as desirable design features for hospitals even though here it must have served a more aesthetic than functional purpose seeing as that it was always used as a maternity hospital.

Photo by Emma Gilleece

Another striking feature of this building is its use of brick which Sheahan departed from in the design of the earlier Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Dooradoyle. In a letter Sheahan sent to Limerick Corporation dated 8 January 1954 Sheahan draws attention to an earlier correspondence from the Department of Health stating that provision should be made for invitation of tenders on basis of concrete block or brick plastered externally, but with provision for alternative price for brick facing[11]. He ends this letter ‘I am most anxious that we be allowed to use brick facing on this building’. He unfortunately does not offer a reason.

Balusters on central staircase which matches one on balcony to front elevation of hospital.

 Recent extensions and alterations

Photo taken by Emma Gilleece

In 1995 the pre-natal and anti-natal wards had ensuite toilets installed in each four-bed or two-bed rooms. This was done simply by blocked off the corner of each room losing minimal space and keeping the same amount of beds. The year 2006 saw the completion of a new three-storey extension to the complex designed by Murray O’Laoire and O’Connell Architects. This much needed block gave the hospital a larger, better sited main entrance thus leaving the old entrance for the exclusive use of outpatients. In addition to the extra ground floor space it provided extra ward space on the first floor and a new operating theatre on the second floor. It is to the same specifications of the older theatre apart from the inclusion of air conditioning.

Extra space is vital especially after the closure of the Maternity unit in Ennis making the County of Clare reliant on either Limerick for Galway for its maternity care. 

The future of the hospital

These plans were welcomes by the management of the hospital for logistical reasons as all gynaecological care as previously mentioned is sited in Dooradoyle and the Maternity hospital has no laboratories so have to send everything to be tested to the Regional Hospital. The staff and management have been waiting over a decade for this news. The hospital for even more years has required urgent renovation and modernization and the minor additions with the 2006 extension acted as a band-aid bringing the hospital up to the minimum standard to carry on in its current condition.

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[1] ‘Limerick to get new Maternity Hospital under Capital Plan’, Limerick Leader, 29 September 2015.

[2] Terry Forristal, ‘Bedford Row lying-in hospital 1812-1975’, OLJ (Limerick, 2006), p13.

[3] St Gerard’s Maternity Home, St Anthony’s Maternity Home, Alexandra Maternity Home, Mrs O’Malley’s Maternity Home and Bedford Row Extern, the Marian and Tranquiller in Fort Mary Park. (T. Forristal (2006), p.17).

[4] IB 22 Jan 1938, 73.

[5]‘Tuberculosis Scheme’, L/MIN/20 14 Nov. 1944.

[6] Letter from Limerick City Medical Officer to the Dept. of Health dated 6 July 1948, L/MIN/21, LCA.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Forristal (2006) ‘Bedford row lying-in hospital, 1812-1975’, p.18.

[9] Forristal, p.18.

[10] Per. con. with QS of hospital, Barry Sheppard.

[11] Ref: H18/7/1, L.A

The Dublin Wittgenstein would've seen in 1930s

Crisis of Identity: Wittgenstein’s take on Irish Georgian

"The people who built these houses had the taste to know that they had nothing very important to say; and therefore they didn't attempt to express anything."

This statement was attributed to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein upon viewing the streetscape of Georgian Dublin during the first of his visits to Ireland in the 1930s which was recorded on the account of his close friend Dr Con Drury's 'Recollection’[1]. Like language architecture is difficult to define. Even though the configuration and manipulation of materials to enclose and control empty space is universal to all human cultures, architectural taste and opinion is subjective. Wittgenstein’s philosophy was of a linguistic nature based on expressing oneself accurately to which he viewed architecture as a means of self-expression in the same way as the spoken word. In this one statement Wittgenstein demonstrated his lack of knowledge of Ireland’s unique colonial history and his inability to ‘read’ the language if its visual landscape. However, further on in Drury’s article, Wittgenstein would articulate the tension and consequences of the social constructionism of Irish Georgian architecture. Even though his field was philosophy, examining the status of landscape as image and symbol established common ground between practitioners from a variety of different disciplines concerned with culture: geography, history, fine art, literature and anthropology[2].

Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889-1951) Austrian philsosopher 

“Now I know what was meant by the phrase ‘the Protestant Ascendancy.’ These buildings have the appearance of a fortress. But now the gypsies inhabit the castle.”[3] In this one sentence Wittgenstein expressed his ignorance of the particular historical circumstances of this nation. Through many countries in this world were under British colonialism, Ireland’s history is a distinctly unique one. To Wittgenstein the Classical façades of the capital were symmetrical ordered expressions of nothingness. They in fact reveal the story of the architectural landscape in pre and post-independence Ireland of conquest, the constant reaffirmation of social and political status and finally its recreation and assimilation into the broader realm of Irish identity. From a semiotic point of view, the secondary meaning of these buildings, defined by Panofsky as the reading of conventional meaning of shared knowledge such as literary and visual sources[4], is that of the Anglo-Irish imitation of British tastes. Panofsky asserted those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, and a religious or philosophical persuasion are unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work.[5] The systematic association of these shared design gestures is the architecture of colonisers.

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown

The title of David Lloyd’s book ‘Anomalous states’ aptly describes nineteenth century Ireland’s “crisis of representation.”[6] There was a clear dichotomy of the Irish population into two opposed classes; the landed proprietors of Protestant ascendancy gentry; the mass of indigenous rural Catholic tenantry and later on towards the end of the century a growing, usually Catholic, middle class who were denounced by the masses for their aspirational attempts at emulating the Anglo-Irish. This crisis of identity goes back to the Plantations with the acquisition and reusage of land as well as the Anglicising of place names. This enforcement of a foreign dialect with the de-familiarization of homeland would be later depicted in Brian Friel’s play ‘Translations’ (1980) set in 1833. On acquiring these estates, the new landlords of Ireland set about landscaping surplus acreage. In tandem with building gardening was extremely fashionable throughout the eighteenth century. Mrs Delany’s garden at Delville was one of the first to embrace the naturalistic style of gardening made popular by landscape designers Lancelot ‘Capablity’ Brown. In a letter of 1744 she describes fields planted in a wild way with forest trees and with bushes that look so naturally you would not imagine it a work of art.[7] Other examples are of Lady Louisa Connolly and her sister the Duchess of Leinster who created settings for the two great Palladian houses, Castletown and Carton in County Kildare in a typically Irish manner, more in line with Stephen Switzer’s natural wilderness as outlines in his ‘Ichnographia Rustica’ (1741) where he criticised the formality of Dutch gardening. This was a reaction to the manicured bare lawns of rolling grass vistas from the houses as an expression of control. In addition the social statement this feature was making was an indication of the wealth of the landowner in being able to afford to either pay teams of scythe-wielding Irish labourers to keep their pristine lawns in check or keep a herd of sheep to do the job. Others in a contrived obsession of geometric perfection employed hundreds of local labourers to drain natural lakes and bogs.

Castletown House, Co. Kildare purchased by the State in 1994

This was the landscaping pursuits of colonisers. However some Anglo-Irish landlords manipulated the natural Irish landscape for either aesthetic or functional reasons and in doing so they have changed the vernacular language of certain parts of the country just as they did with the renaming of the townlands. The two native Irish oak tree species, Quercus robur (pendunculate or common oak) and Quercus petraea (sessile oak) fell victim to the reshaping of the countryside Oak had a spiritual importance to the Celts and were protected by Brehon law.[8] Of the 62,000 townland names in Ireland, 13000 have reference to trees and 1,600 have some derivation of ‘dair’ the Irish work for oak, e.g. Cill Dara (Kildare) meaning ‘Church of the Oak.’ Landscaping was not just a frivolous activity to satisfy aesthetic tastes; it became a social and economic necessity. It was one thing to clear the land of forests and lakes but it was another to incorporate evidence of Ireland’s independent Celtic past as part of their demesne design. Round towers, ruins of abbeys and monasteries were used as follies and eye catchers for the pleasure of the landowner. Not

Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough

only did the retention of an older building or ruin in the vicinity of a contrasting new building help to project a sense of progress[9] but it can be seen as an overall analogy of the acquisition of tangible structures with evocative overtones of past grandeur, high kings, native saints and Roman Catholicism.[10] The earliest recorded proposal to use a ruined building building as a garden ornament has already been noted in Sir John Vanbrugh’s letter to the Duchess of Marlborough of 1709. In this he urges her to retain the ruined shell of Woodstock Manor as an eye-catcher to close the vista in the new park at Blenheim in addition to its picturesque qualities.[11] Owing to the fact that this was before the fashionable taste for follies typified by Alexander Pope the Duchess demolished the ruin. When the taste for follies did become popular at times they were even faked by landscape architects.

To interpret and understand landscape design in its entirety the dwelling of the landowner on the estate must also be taken into consideration. These were the 'Big House' to use the Irish vernacular. In ‘Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size’ Maurice Craig points out that the term itself indicates more about the position of the landlord than it does about the actual size of the residence.[12] In Post-Independence Ireland the meaning of the term “big house” has become a general expression for large and threatening institutions, particularly prisons and mental hospitals. For the Anglo-Irish novelist, the gentry house became the most compelling symbol of ascendancy ideologies and survival. Roy Foster reminds us that it can also be read as insecurity not just triumphalism that lies behind the architectural stamp of ascendancy culture on the landscape.[13] Defensive architecture became an inspiration for landscape design such as the castellated façade of Glin Castle which was gothicised in the 1780s.[14] These defensive motifs have the associated connotations of keeping outsiders out on the peripheries literally and socially. The fate of actual Big Houses in the twentieth century reflects the working out of such rupture and turbulence in Irish history. During the struggle for independence from 1919 to 1921 and the subsequent civil war, nearly two hundred Irish country houses were destroyed as the symbols of a colonising force, sometimes without considerations for the policies of their owners.

These quiet residences were attacked due to the understanding of the power of the image. Still other houses withstood the years of political crises only to fall victim to the inability of their owners to maintain them or to the neglect of a new national ambivalent about its colonial heritage. For instance Lady Gregory’s Coole Park, the eighteenth century Big House that served as the centre of the Irish Literary Revival, was torn down in 1941, reputedly for the price of its stone. [15] W.B. Yeats prophesised its coming ruin in a dignified appeal to posterity

Here traveller, scholar, poet take your stand

When all these rooms and passages are gone

When nettle wave upon a shapeless mound

And sapling root among the broken stone

(‘Coole Park, 1929’)

Coole Park, Gort, Co. Galway sold to the State in 1927. Demolished in 1941

Similarly in 1961, a few years after Elizabeth Bowen found herself unable to meet the costs of maintaining Bowen’s Court, the house dating back to 1776 was demolished by a new owner who was more interested in acquiring fertile farmland then in preserving a historic mansion that entertained such literary guests as Virginia Wolf.[16]

Even though Irish architecture was built in the same method and style as England, it is an individual story, as distinct from that of England. Christopher Hussey, editor of Country Life  observed in the 1930s that Irish Architecture ‘developed along the lines that have only a general reference to English practice.[17] This could be due to the fact that remarkably few architectural books were published in eighteenth century Ireland, and few that were are concentrated in the 1750s.[18] For early eighteenth century stuccodores like Michael Stapleton who have to reply on their patron’s awareness of trends in England or the slow trickle of imported English pattern books such as George Richardson, Michelangelo Pergolesi, James Gibbs, Isaac Ware and William Adam provided most of the vocabulary of the practitioners.[19] Curiously patrons after 1800 did not make these decorative decisions but in fact this aesthetic expressive was left up to the whims of the builder. However when patrons did make such décor statements they did not slavishly imitate their Continental contemporaries. They generally stuck to the Palladian style in a reaction to the Baroque style prominent in mainland Europe. The most outstanding characteristic of the Irish house was the ‘largeness of scale.’ For Hussey this peculiarly Irish phenomenon was due to a series of causes, including the cheapness of labour. Funny that Wittgenstein should have been making his statement in the 1930s when other were discussing how Ireland contributed so much to Georgian architecture such as the discovery of the Castletown drawings by Edward Lovett Pearce who was not given significant attention except for an article in the Irish Builder in 1931.

Misguided perspectives of our colonial past and the gathering bitterness of a looming Easter Rising anniversary led to the demolition of sixteen Georgian buildings in the 1960s on Fitzwilliam Street to make way for the ESB Headquarters (1970) designed by Gibney Stephenson & Associates. It was once the longest expanse of intact Georgian architecture anywhere in the world.[20] The Georgian vista that existed until then consisted of almost a mile of continuous houses passing through two squares. Drury no doubt brought this street to the attention of the critical Wittgenstein. They have since tried to undo the wrongs of the past by restoring Number Twenty Nine as a reproduction of life in eighteenth century Dublin. The look of the building can be imitated but alas not the genius loci. Another example of the tension of the loom 1916 anniversary was the destruction of the very unpopular Nelson Pillar by the IRA on the 8 March 1966.

Those ultra Republicans who chose to take out their frustrations on the big houses were selective in their task. They ignored such houses as Avondale, the 523 acre estate situated at the southern end of the Avonmore Valley in Rathdrum, County Wicklow where Charles Stewart Parnell was born and lived all his life.[21]The celebrated ‘uncrowned king’ of Ireland was a landowner himself. The house originally designed by James Wyatt and completed in 1777.[22] It was handed over to the state in 1904 with repairs carried out in 1935. It is now the Forestry School run by Coillte. Conversely Patrick Pearse moved his school St Enda’s from Ranelagh to the Hermitage, an eighteenth century house in Rathfarnham surrounded by park and woodland haemorrhaging money since the day it opened. 

Exterior of Stonborough House

 Looking at Wittgenstein’s one and only completed design it is no surprise that the Georgian paradigm ‘had nothing very important to say.’  Stonborough House 1926-1928[23] is a tangible expression of his philosophical theories in ‘Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus’ (1921). It is a white cube, absent of all ornamentation, polished concrete floors and curtainless windows. His influences by his friend Adolf Loos who once did a paper called ‘Ornament and Crime’ are evident. Wittgenstein was reading Freud at the time who argued that unconscious forces seethed below a purportedly ordered and elegant society so this could also account for Wittgenstien’s abhorrence of decoration. This is a stark contrast to the finishes and furnishings of Georgian dwellings.

Interiors of Stonborough House

In the post-colonial nostalgia to recreate what Ireland supposedly was like before the Plantations, De Valera announced the start of Ireland’s cultural exclusiveness with the naming of Catholicism and Irish was the first religion and language of the country in the 1937 Constitution. The once dubbed Land of Saints and Scholars which attracted scholars from all over Europe in the quest for knowledge and learning now proclaimed its policy of self-induced isolation. This ironically made Fianna Fail as guilty as the ascendency of sectarianism; of favouring one set of value systems over another. Therefore it is important that the current generation fully embraces all aspects of our architectural past by investigating the negatives and positives of the Georgian ideologies as expressed in their environment. The landscape is a legacy of past economic and social order and it produces meanings which vary over time as different ‘readings’ or constructions are put on it.[24]  For Wittgenstein philosophical problems have their beginnings in the feeling of being lost and in an unfamiliar place and philosophical answers are in the nature of finding one’s way back.[25] This image of turning back, of finding not as moving forward towards a gal but as being led back, is pervasive in his later writings and that is what Ireland has to do to fully appreciate her Georgian landscape.

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[1] H. Wittgenstein, F. Pascal, F.R. Leavis, J. King and M.O.C Drury, (1984) ‘Recollections.’

[2] D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, (eds). (1988) ‘The Iconography of Landscape.’ Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press: p.1

[3] G. Hetherington, (1987) ‘Wittgenstein in Ireland: An Account of his various visits from 1934 to 1949’ Irish University Review, Vol.17, No.2: p.174

[4] Hasenmueller, C. (1978) ‘Panofsky, iconography and semiotics, Journal of Aesthetics and art criticism, Vol.36 No.3: p.290

[5] Cosgrove & Daniels, ‘The iconography of landscape’, p.2

[6] D. Llpyd, (1993) ‘Anomalous states; Irish writing and the post-colonial moment’, US: Duke Uni. Press.

[7] M. Heron, (1993)’ The Hidden Gardens of Ireland,’ Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, p.199

[8] Today trees are protected in Ireland by the Forestry Acts of 1928 and 1946.

[9] J. Howley (1993) ‘The follies and garden buildings of Ireland’, London: Yale Uni. Press, p.109

[10] E. Malins and Knight of Glin (1976) ‘Lost demesnes, Irish landscape gardening 1660-1845’, London, p.2

[11] Howley, ‘Follies and garden buildings’, p.106

[12] M. Craig (2006) ‘Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Sze’, Dublin: Ashfield Press, p.3

[13] R. Foster (1988) ‘Modern Ireland 1600-1972’, London: Penguin Books.

[14] ) ‘The noble dwelling of Ireland, Hong Kong’, Thames and Hudson, p.137

[15] V. Kreilkamp (1998) The Anglo-Irish Novel and the big house’, New York: Syracus Uni. Press, p.5

[16][16] M. Heron (1993) ‘The Hidden Gardens of Ireland,’ Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, p.199

[17] S. O’Reilly (1998) ‘Irish Houses and Gardens’, Great Britain: Aurum Press, p.15

[18] M. Craig (2006) ‘Irish Houses of Middle Size’, p.51

[19] Ibid.

[20] F.McDonald (2009) ‘ESB competition for world-class redesign of HQ’, Irish Times, April 20.

[21] M Heron, p.40

[22] The name Avondale appears for the first time in 1777 in Taylor and Skinners maps of the Roads of Ireland.

[23] S. Jeffries (2002) ‘A dwelling for the gods’, The Guardian, January 5.

[24] P.J Duffy (2007)’ Exploring history and heritage of Irish landscapes’, Dublin: Four Courts Press, p.15

[25] V.Das (1998) ‘Wittgenstein and anthropology’ Annual Review of anthropology, Vol.27, p.195